It was time for a change. I had spent
way too much time rifling through boxes not finding the tools I
want. I switched to pegboard storage. Yep, it was to be
idyllic, a new era of having all my tools on display on a wall so
that I could find any given one instantly.
After identifying target wall space, I
bought the pegboard, and a couple packages of little metal hooky
things. Once the pegboard was mounted on the wall, I started
arranging my tools. Of course, there wasn't enough space on the
board, and optimal packing of tools created an unaesthetic clutter,
but I was enthusiastic. Well, at least I was until the first time I
hastily grabbed a tool and half the collection fell from their hooks
onto the floor. As I put them back and realized how badly these
hooks worked, I thought, “tool boxes never did this”.
That's a problem. Those cheapo metal
hooks don't fit securely. Oh, I should have bought higher quality?
Um, like where? As far as I can tell, they're all made in China and
they all are junk.
It was time for a new solution and the
answer sat on my toolbench: Makerbot Replicator 2. I'd design my
own pegboard storage hooks and make them secure. I could print as
many as I'd like and customize them to be perfect.
Part #1 Choose a new location for the
pegboard, closer to my work bench. There isn't any wall space, but
there is a shelving unit that has adjustable shelves using peg/slot
system. If I could adapt the shelving peg/slot system with a pegbard
peg/hole system, mounting should be easy.
The pegboard has one inch between all
the holes. The shelving has sixteen and a half inches between
horizontal holes, and two inches between vertical. Adapting from
pegboard to shelving requires two type of adapters.
I started with
Peg Board Hanger
(
siderits
) /
CC BY 3.0
and sliced off all the extra stuff to make a blank pegboard support.
From there I made two variants with pegs that would fit in the shelf supports.
Why two different ones? The singled legged one lines up directly on a one inch mark. The two legged one has the peg on a half inch mark. That's what it took to get the proper alignment between the shelf brackets.
Once printed, they looked like this:
and then in place on the backside of the pegboard:
Hanging them on the shelves was simple:
Are they strong enough to hold all the tools? I printed these as solids for the greatest strength. Thinking of these as pegs as sacraficial, I then grabbed the top of the board and tried to pull it down and break the pegs.
I was unsuccessful in breaking them and therefore successful in mounting my peg board.
In my next blog posting, I'll start populating my peg board with custom tool hooks and holders that won't loosen and fall off.
and sliced off all the extra stuff to make a blank pegboard support.
From there I made two variants with pegs that would fit in the shelf supports.
Why two different ones? The singled legged one lines up directly on a one inch mark. The two legged one has the peg on a half inch mark. That's what it took to get the proper alignment between the shelf brackets.
Once printed, they looked like this:
and then in place on the backside of the pegboard:
Hanging them on the shelves was simple:
Are they strong enough to hold all the tools? I printed these as solids for the greatest strength. Thinking of these as pegs as sacraficial, I then grabbed the top of the board and tried to pull it down and break the pegs.
I was unsuccessful in breaking them and therefore successful in mounting my peg board.
In my next blog posting, I'll start populating my peg board with custom tool hooks and holders that won't loosen and fall off.